Leticia
Leticia sits at the tip of a narrow Colombian corridor where three countries share a riverbank — step south and you're in Peru, cross east by boat and you're in Brazil. There are no roads in or out. You arrive by air, the jungle closes behind the plane, and the city opens onto the Amazon like a frontier that never quite decided what it was.
The mototaxis are the public transport system here — five minutes to anywhere, a couple of dollars at most. The port smells of fish and diesel. Squirrel monkeys by the thousands live on an island you can reach before lunch. Half a day is enough to feel the place; an evening on the Malecón, watching the river go wide and brown in the last light, is the reason to stay the night.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who come back tend to time it around the Pirarucú de Oro festival at the end of November — the crowds are thinner than July and the music carries into the streets. They also learn fast: download everything before you land, because the internet here is genuinely, stubbornly slow, even in the better hotels.
Deals in Leticia
Book directly at the providerHow Leticia came to be
A Peruvian captain named Benigno Bustamante founded the settlement on April 25, 1867, calling it San Antonio. Later that same year, engineer Manuel Charón renamed it Leticia — after Leticia Smith, a young woman from Iquitos who was his wife. The port changed hands through diplomacy rather than design: a 1922 treaty ceded the area from Peru to Colombia, a deal that proved explosive a decade later.
In September 1932, two hundred Peruvians seized Leticia's public buildings, triggering a short, sharp war fought in close quarters along the river. The League of Nations brokered a ceasefire in May 1933, and Colombia's sovereignty was formally confirmed in June 1934. To anchor that sovereignty, Bogotá sent waves of its own citizens south through the 1940s and into the 1960s — many of whose families remain in the city today.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
Leticia is equatorial and wet year-round, with temperatures running between 22°C/71°F and 31°C/88°F most days. The rains ease slightly from June through September — austral winter — making that the most comfortable window for time outdoors.
Right now
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.